


Of Earthquakes and Trolls - What Homestuck Fandom Means to Me

by umiyuki



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anxiety, Earthquakes, Essays, Japan, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-11
Packaged: 2018-03-17 09:29:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3524168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/umiyuki/pseuds/umiyuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A personal essay about my experiences during the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Homestuck fandom, and how the two are inextricably linked for me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Earthquakes and Trolls - What Homestuck Fandom Means to Me

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this essay on March 5th, 2015; references to the current time in the essay itself should be taken to mean March 5th, not the day I posted it. I dithered about posting this for about a week, but now that it's the anniversary of the earthquake, I figured it was an appropriate time.
> 
> Thank you all for reading. <3

I've been meaning to write this essay for a very long time now. Around this time every year I always start feeling kind of terrible, and every year it takes me longer than perhaps it should to remember why.

I cannot believe it has been four years already since the earthquake. 

Every time I think about this fact it just completely blows my mind - that somehow four years have passed since the disaster that changed so many people's lives forever. Mine included, and I wasn't even one of the people most affected by it. I live inland, after all, so I was nowhere near the tsunami that ravaged the northern Japan coast. I didn't lose my home or my family. But it was still one of the most harrowing and lonely times of my life.

The earthquake knocked out the power in my town, and hundreds of others, for several days in the middle of winter (yes, March is still the middle of winter here). I got home from work that day with about an hour left until the sun set and I'd be left with no light, and I spent that hour clearing the mess in my room and putting every blanket in the house on my bed so I'd be able to stay warm after dark. Japanese houses are very poorly insulated; without the heat on overnight it was pretty common to wake up in a literally freezing room. I also had to take stock of what utilities in my house were still functional: there was no power, but the water was still running, the gas was still working, and most importantly, the phone lines were still up. I have an old phone that works fine without electricity, so I was able to call my family and leave them a message (it was around 2 am where they are, I think) to let them know I was alive and okay.

My laptop, on the other hand, didn't work at all; it was several years old by then, and the battery had completely given out, so it was totally unusable without electricity. And even if it had been functional, there wouldn't have been internet without electricity to power the modem. I did have my cell phone for internet access, but I was afraid to use it too much for fear of running down the battery, since I couldn't recharge it.

The days immediately following the earthquake are surreal to think back on now. The aftershocks were more frightening than the initial quake, really; every time the ground started to shake again, you never knew if it was going to be a small aftershock or a large one, but you always feared the worst. And they never seemed to stop - I gave up on counting how many happened in a day, but every time they came, I felt paralyzed with fear. The absolute worst aftershock happened one night about a month after the initial quake, one so big it totally knocked the power out again. It scared me so badly I couldn't even move at first; I just sat in the dark and cried for about ten minutes. I had never been afraid of earthquakes before March 11, 2011, but I have been ever since.

The thing about the time after the earthquake was, there was just nothing to do. Everything went completely silent for days. During the daylight hours I could do things - clean up the house, walk to the grocery store for food (there were no food shortages where I lived, thankfully), go for a drive when I could no longer stand the dull nothingness of being alone in my house. The driving had to be kept to a minimum, too. I had only half a tank of gas in my car before the quake, as I was short on money before my next paycheck and had decided to wait on filling it up rather than putting it on my credit card. At the time I had thought it a very responsible decision; to this day I totally regret it. Driving did make it possible to charge my phone during the period with no electricity, and I used it for that more than I probably should have, given that the gasoline shortages made it nigh impossible to buy gasoline for weeks.

But the daylight hours were short - 7 am to around 5 pm, at this time of year - and once the sun went down it was just dark and silent and cold. I had a flashlight and a small lantern I could use for light in the evenings. I would get into bed after sunset, wearing as many layers as possible for insulation. Even in this emergency situation I couldn't bring myself to wear shoes in my bed, but I did have warm socks and the thick liners from my snowboots. And I would just lie there in the dark, doing nothing because there was nothing to do. I must have been sleeping about ten hours a day, back then. Had I been able to sleep the whole night through, it would've been more like twelve, but I woke up every time there was an aftershock, and it was always a while before I could calm down enough to go back to sleep.

Finally, on the third day after the quake, I drove into town to try to buy gasoline. I ended up in a queue of cars that stretched several blocks, had to wait for about an hour, and when I actually got to the gas station, I found out that they were only selling each person a thousand yen worth of gasoline - around six liters, I think, or about a gallon and a half. This didn't bolster my ailing gas tank much, but it was still worth having made the trip; when I got back home, the electricity had been restored! I had lights and heating again, hot water, my computer. There was still no internet, but I could charge my phone at home. Not many experiences since have quite equalled the joy I felt when I came home on March 14th to find the electricity back on.

And when I went back to work on Monday, there was not just electricity there, but internet as well. While I was at work I could check my emails, facebook, tumblr, keep up with friends and with fandom. This probably sounds insignificant and silly, but I really cannot convey enough how important a lifeline fandom was to me at that time. Specifically, Homestuck fandom. I don't think I would go quite so far as to say that Homestuck fandom saved my life, but I would definitely say that it made one of the worst periods of my life livable.

I'd gotten into Homestuck about a month or so before the earthquake. I'd read Problem Sleuth avidly during its epic run, but had never quite managed to get into Homestuck until I saw a rec of it that caught my eye and decided to give it another shot. And once I actually got into it, I devoured it. I loved it. I couldn't stop reading it. I think I must have caught up right around the time Murderstuck was going on; I distinctly remember the horrible pained cries going up from the entire fandom around that time. I came across the kinkmeme on LJ and found prompts I loved and wanted to write for, as well as great fics by tons of talented authors. I had the most consistently productive period of fandom output I've ever had in my life. I was, in fact, in the middle of working on a fic for the kinkmeme right at the moment the earthquake happened (this is a fact I have rarely mentioned to anyone; I've always felt awkward about the idea of responding to casual "What were you doing when the earthquake hit?" inquiries with "I was writing fanfiction about teenage aliens spooning in a pile of plush toy dragons"). During the period when I had no electricity at home I used my phone's precious battery life to keep up with the kinkmeme because it was one of the few things that would actually load properly for me. I bookmarked some of my own fills so that when I was feeling awful and hopeless I could read over the nice comments people had left for me.

Homestuck fandom was pretty much my lifeline to human interaction during that time. I didn't have any real friends who lived close enough to me that I could visit them in person; my best friend from university lived on the other side of the country, my friends in Tokyo were supportive by phone but also 300 miles away with no way for me to get to them, and my closest friend nearby was in another city, inaccessible to me since there were no trains or buses running from my town and I couldn't spare the gasoline to drive all the way there myself. I was basically an island. But for the hours of the day when I was at the office, I could get online and keep up with Homestuck fandom, and have something in my life that was actually _fun_. I downloaded fics, I saved fanart, I copied prompts from the kinkmeme so I could write fills at home. I am still so grateful to everyone in fandom who said kind things about my writing at that time; it really did mean the world to me. Thank you all so much.

Another thing that happened in Homestuck fandom not long after the earthquake was the release of the Alterniabound album on BandCamp. I have always meant to write a message thanking the contributors to the album, because I don't think there has ever been an album that mattered more to me than that one. I loved, loved the music from the meteor gameplay sections in canon. The BandCamp description said something about how the album was for "people who keep the game open in another tab so they can listen to Horsechestra on repeat for hours" - I was one of those people (though for me it was Eridan's theme that I couldn't stop listening to). When I was browsing on my work computer and saw that the Alterniabound album had been released, it was the best thing that had happened to me in days. I bought it with my heart pounding with excitement, downloaded it straight to a USB, and took it home to add it to my music library. I hadn't been able to listen to any of the music on BandCamp or even the MSPA website while my internet was down, and having the Alterniabound music back in my life was a huge bright spot in a bleak time. I hardly ever stopped listening to it for weeks after that. I was anxious and afraid more or less all the time back then, without many avenues for distraction, especially when I was at home with no internet. The one thing I found that really worked for helping me actually calm down was to put Alterniabound (or selected tracks thereof) on repeat and play Bejeweled Twist on my computer. I think I was playing Bejeweled Twist for about four or five hours a day, just to keep the anxiety at bay, and I've listened to some of the tracks from Alterniabound hundreds, maybe even thousands of times. It is still total comfort music to me.

I haven't been active in Homestuck fandom for a long time now. I think the last thing I wrote for it was something for the first Homestuck Shipping Olympics. Since then, I've still kept up with the comic and the fandom, but there hasn't been anything I've felt compelled to write fic about; I feel like I've written all the stories about it that I needed to, at least for now. But every year around this time, I always find myself nostalgic for my time in Homestuck fandom, and end up revisiting all the old fics I loved reading on the kinkmeme and AO3. One I keep coming back to again and again is urbanAnchorite's "lock it up and leave". uA, if you're reading this, I know "lock it up and leave" was never your favorite of your works and you've always been self-deprecating about it, but I just want you to know that flawed or not, I have always loved it and always will. It's my go-to fic for whenever I need my heart taken apart and put back together, and that's something I need a lot at this time of year. I reread it the day I wrote this, as a matter of fact; it was the catalyst for me to actually write this essay after years of putting it off. It's been four years now, so this is terribly overdue, but. Thank you so much for writing that fic. I'm so glad you did.

I guess what I really wanted to say is, I still love Homestuck fandom, even if I'm not involved in it much anymore. I still think the world of the people I met there - whether or not you're still into Homestuck yourself, whether or not we ever had the chance to meet IRL, whether or not we follow each other anymore, whether or not we ever interacted outside of anon comments and fic kudos, whether or not we're in touch anymore, I am still happy to have shared the experience of Homestuck with you. You gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning during one of the worst times of my life. You made life worth living for me, and I will always be grateful to you for that. Thank you all so much.


End file.
